81–90 of 544 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes even more sense to allow it, and regulate it. The regulation should be the existing Know Your Customer requirements plus a 100% traceable log subject to inspection, auditing and subpoena.
If Tornado Cash implemented KYC requirements and a 100% traceable log, what fraction of their existing users would continue to use them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more akin to saying people shouldn't be able to provide banking services if they don't have sufficient KYC practices.
What part of "trustless peer-to-peer electronic CASH", in Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper, did you not understand? There is no banking going on.
Banning a service because it "might be used for illegal purposes" is insufficient. This is a problem with law enforcement in general: they are lazy and seek to have automated solutions to so much of what used to be called police work. This applies to warrant-less wiretaps, pulling information on people from 3rd party data brokers to side-step warrant and FOIA requirements, and more. I would rather money-launderers ge…
The flaw with this line of reasoning is that behaviors have changed. In the past, when the police did "police work", people had no choice but to meet in person to discuss their criminal enterprises. You could follow them, and listen in. Many illicit schemes also left a trail of paper that needed to be stored in physical space.
It's not that the police have gotten lazy, it's that if you expect criminals to hang out in a shady dockside speakeasy like they did when Al Capone ran the town, you're simply not going to find anything.
This is a real tricky problem to which I'm not sure there are good solutions. There's a mounting conflict of interest upholding the law on the one hand, and the interests of law-abiding citizens on the other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is that it's distributed open-source software, with no man in the middle, no single point of failure. That's right: Government sanctioned open-source SOFTWARE. Are you sure you want this precedent set?
I have no problem with Tornado Cash being openly available software under a permissive license. I have a problem with people running a Tornado Cash-based service that is really just a money laundering service. You should take a step back: "open source" does not rinse away the underlying properties of a service. I can't write and deploy a web application that contracts hitmen and use the MIT license as a defense; the…
Tornado Cash in itself does is not launderying money because you still have to prove to the IRS how you got the money or the asset(i.e bills, invoice etc) and you still have to obey KYC rules. You can't just say the money is from Tornado Cash and be done with it.
Is the U.S Mint a money launderying service because it provides an untraceable method (cash) to conduct transactions?
Banning a service because it "might be used for illegal purposes" is insufficient. This is a problem with law enforcement in general: they are lazy and seek to have automated solutions to so much of what used to be called police work. This applies to warrant-less wiretaps, pulling information on people from 3rd party data brokers to side-step warrant and FOIA requirements, and more. I would rather money-launderers ge…
"Might be used for illegal purposes" is a significant understatement. The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is in and of itself a crime in both the US and Netherlands. Normally, there'd be an aspect of plausible deniability: torrent index operators can, for example, rightfully claim that they're facilitating legal filesharing, or that they're entirely agnostic to the content being shared…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a service specifically designed to facilitate money laundering. It's a bit like running a business that produces paperwork to make stolen cars indistinguishable from legal ones - there's no reason such a service should be allowed to exist.
That's like saying knives are designed to facilitate murder. TC is made for privacy, which either is or should be a basic right. Without tools such as TC if I send you money, show you some POAPs[1] I own, or otherwise interact in any way with my crypto, it is fairly simple to deduce or make educated guesses of how much crypto I own, who I send it to or from, and more. This has serious implications not only for privac…
There are plenty of knives that are designed to facilitate murder, and they are correspondingly regulated.
We don't regulate kitchen knives in that way, because they don't represent the same intent.
If your financial instrument leaks all of your transactions and makes you a target of criminal scrutiny, you should consider using a different instrument. Society is not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater to accomodate your public immutable ledger.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Might be used for illegal purposes" is a significant understatement. The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is in and of itself a crime in both the US and Netherlands. Normally, there'd be an aspect of plausible deniability: torrent index operators can, for example, rightfully claim that they're facilitating legal filesharing, or that they're entirely agnostic to the content being shared…
The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is that it's distributed open-source software, with no man in the middle, no single point of failure. That's right: Government sanctioned open-source SOFTWARE. Are you sure you want this precedent set?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if central powers stop being lazy then nothing was illicit. No violence can be inflicted from trading digital currencies. It's lazy policing to try and control resources rather than stop the actual violence. If someone owns a resource, no matter who they are, why shouldn't they be able to utilize it? If that resource was acquired with violent means such as human trafficking - then maybe our policing efforts should be…
That may be true if law enforcement authorities have unlimited resources, but in practice they don't. Imagine that a hypothetical service is used at 99% for illicit transactions and 1% for legitimate ones. Is the best outcome for society to spend say 5 million dollars to shut down that service, or 500 million to figure out who is using that service maliciously and sue only the people who are using it maliciously?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Might be used for illegal purposes" is a significant understatement. The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is in and of itself a crime in both the US and Netherlands. Normally, there'd be an aspect of plausible deniability: torrent index operators can, for example, rightfully claim that they're facilitating legal filesharing, or that they're entirely agnostic to the content being shared…
The chief purpose of a mixer is financial privacy. It’s just that on a public blockchain privacy from snoops and privacy from law enforcement can’t be differentiated.